Mövenpick Hotels & Resorts Help Guests Make Memories That Last a Lifetime with OPERA Cloud – By Stacey Truman

Upscale brand, Mövenpick Hotel & Resorts, goes well beyond everyday guest service. Mövenpick’s mission is to do ordinary things in an extraordinary way to make memories that last a lifetime for its guests.

To deliver on that mission, Mövenpick needed to recognize its guests when they travel to any of its 83 hotels across 24 countries across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. That was difficult to do, as it had several disparate hotel PMS systems from different vendors on various versions – none of which were connected. It was challenging to recognize a guest that frequented one Mövenpick property and then another.

Mövenpick Group CIO, Floor Bleeker, explains, “One of the first benefits we’ve seen with OPERA Cloud is that we now have one customer database. We can recognize our customers as they travel around the world and stay in our properties.”

A single guest profile enables Mövenpick to enhance a guest’s stay by bringing up saved account information, making check-in and check-out faster and easier. They can also customize the guest’s experience, based on special preferences they’ve previously indicated in their profile.

The move to OPERA Cloud is not surprising, given that the hotel company has selected a Cloud strategy for all its applications. “The reason for Cloud is very simple. We want to take the complexity out of our properties, reduce the staff assigned onsite at properties so that we can realign them to focus on innovation, instead of operating legacy systems,” commented Bleeker. In addition to the benefits of a slim infrastructure, a Cloud hotel PMS platform enables Mövenpick properties to enjoy the latest features and reap the benefits of a continuously improved OPERA system. Finally, new hotels can go live and easily train staff quickly, without onsite IT support.

Mobility is the biggest benefit to OPERA Cloud from a user perspective though. “One of the key benefits of OPERA Cloud is that it runs on any mobile device. We use mobile devices everywhere. In fact, the first thing many of our general managers do when they wake up in the morning is grab their phone and check the heartbeat of the hotel,” says Bleeker.

“The performance of OPERA Cloud is amazing,” he continues. “We have properties as far as Bali, Morocco, across the Middle East, and the speed is the same everywhere. Our project team flies a lot from Dubai and the in-flight Wi-Fi is often used to update the system without any issues. We even had OPERA Cloud running on a Tesla dashboard screen for ‘mobile’ check-in.”

As Mövenpick continues to roll our OPERA Cloud across its hotels, it has seen improved customer satisfaction and Bleeker is proud of the company’s innovation, “I’m very proud that we were the first international hotel company to implemented OPERA Cloud on such a wide scale. And we look forward to the continuing to enjoy the benefits.”

Mövenpick Hotels & Resorts is in a growth phase; with plans to operate 125 hotels by 2020 and technology is an important enabler for this growth.